In typical document systems, documents are accessed at the whole document level, such that an entire document is received by a client computer from a server for editing. This requires low level data associated with the underlying document format to be transmitted from the server to the client computer. Also, incremental document formats have to be garbage collected and defragmented over a network connection. Furthermore, locks must be controlled across the network. Controlling locks can be complex and fragile task that requires a significant amount of content to be exchanged. Transmitting low level data, including garbage collection and defragmentation information, as well as control locks, unnecessarily ties an application to it's low level file format and can be inflexible and lead to inefficiencies.